


Sonata in E minor - Liberissimamente

by StormLeviosa



Series: In Another Life [4]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Batfamily (DCU), Damian Wayne is Not Robin, Damian Wayne-centric, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, How Do I Tag, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Music, Not Canon Compliant, Orchestra, Sort Of, Violinist Damian Wayne, and so, and so now you get a weird mix of idk how violins work but i do know about music practice, bc my parents thought that was a terrible idea, i was explicitly not allowed to try violin when i was a kid, that's it that's the fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-14
Updated: 2021-01-14
Packaged: 2021-03-18 13:01:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28743669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StormLeviosa/pseuds/StormLeviosa
Summary: It took over a month for him to realise his fingers were tapping out sonatas, concertos, etudes, nocturnes, endless movements on invisible strings. His hands were curling around a bow that was not there, the neck of an instrument still in its case a hundred miles away. He had forgotten his violin, in their haste to leave Gotham. He regretted such oversight now.A musical instrument is not something you can pick up and put down at will, but with a little bit of love, and a whole lot of practice, Damian can figure it out.
Series: In Another Life [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1876492
Comments: 6
Kudos: 59
Collections: Greatest Batfam Fics to Ever Exist





	Sonata in E minor - Liberissimamente

**Author's Note:**

> You know that tumblr post that's like 'what if we named fanfics like music pieces' and I forgot to save it like an idiot? Yeah so this is what happens when people make off hand jokes about it when you're bored at half 11 at night.  
> Full disclosure: I do not play the violin. I have never been part of an orchestra. I _do_ play the piano a little (now very badly) but I'm out of practice. All music knowledge comes from grade 2 theory which I sat about a bazillion years ago. I have probably got stuff wrong. Hopefully it isn't noticeable.

In the weeks between leaving Gotham, and Alfred moving in, Damian was bored. He’d filled a sketch pad, walked so far his feet ached, watched an endless number of videos of stupid, inane things, and still he was restless. It was better after he started school, but still not perfect. He found his fingers tapping out rhythms on desks, his hands curling, his feet jumping. When it got so bad he could not sit still another second, he would wander down the street a ways and people watch. Sometimes he’d find a dog to stroke, or a stray cat to coax towards him (it did not matter if they bit or scratched. He’d dealt with worse) and that would make his day. He missed Titus, missed Alfred the cat, and missed Robin. He missed having something constructive to do.

It took over a month for him to realise his fingers were tapping out sonatas, concertos, etudes, nocturnes, endless movements on invisible strings. His hands were curling around a bow that was not there, fingering the neck of an instrument still in its case a hundred miles away. His feet were jumping to a song that played only in his head. He had forgotten his violin, in their haste to leave Gotham. He regretted such oversight now.

There was only so much drawing, walking, watching he could do before he went mad. Or so he told Grayson. Even with school to distract him, without something to do, some extracurricular that took time and practice and effort, he would just keep existing in this state of constant unseemly fidgeting. And perhaps Grayson agreed about the annoyance of the energy beneath his skin, because the next day he came home with a book of staved paper and a penny whistle Damian didn’t know how to play. 

The penny whistle lasted a week before they both agreed it was a pointless endeavor. The endless shrieking was even worse than the boredom.

Damian had no sheet music with him, but he had his brain and he had his ears and he had the whisper of his mother’s tutors in his memory. He listened to music. On the subway, on his walks, on the sofa, wherever he may be. When he could, he took a pencil and a ruler and his book, and he scribbled down notes and barlines and clefs that matched what he heard through his headphones. It wasn’t enough, was never enough, but it took the twitching out of his fingers for a while. 

He graduated from transcribing by ear to composing. The melodies in his mind were not those he had heard over and over, but ones of his own design, and so he wrote those down too. His fingers curled over chords and he tried to remember what it felt like to press the strings, to run a bow across them, tried to imagine what the pieces would sound like, if he ever got to play them. He did not name them, these scribbled, annotated, flustered lines that no one would ever play, just left them, fragmented, in his book. 

When Pennyworth returned with Titus and Alfred the cat, Damian did not dare to hope. Already, so much had been done for him, so many things had been bought or brought and so much had been sacrificed. What was a lonely violin, in the comparison to the upheaval of an entire life? And so he did not ask, did not even wonder, and thanked Pennyworth in the little ways he could. He listened to more music, scribbled more bars in the margins of his homework. 

It turned out Pennyworth had brought far more of their things than his own. Whether this was out of misplaced concern for them, or simply because Pennyworth did not have or need much by way of personal belongings, Damian did not know. But in any case, when they began to unpack his bags, and found one of Grayson’s old college sweaters from a million years ago, it became obvious that he had packed for them, not for himself. 

He had packed Damian’s violin.

The case was still locked, how he’d left it, the folder full of loose sheets still bursting at the seams within, and Damian picked it up with the kind of hushed reverence he normally reserved for precious things like baby birds. It felt like a dream, to finally hold his violin in his hands again. He did not know how he had missed its case among Pennyworth’s bags - it was not exactly small - but the joy of finding it far outweighed his confusion. 

That evening, he played for the first time and he did not breathe. Lack of practice made him stutter over sections he had previously found easy; his fingers slipped over the strings, and his bow screeched far more often than it had in years. He was out of practice. He took a breath. Held it. Played a scale. Played it again and again until it was perfect. Then he packed up for the day. 

He’d had enough of failure.

But the next day, he came back to it, played again. And the next day. And the next. He worked his way up from basic warmups, scales and arpeggios, to the simplest pieces he could bear, and then the more complicated ones. He stopped stuttering and started to play with an easy smoothness that came with practice. That was all he'd needed: practice.

After school, he’d take Titus to walk in the park, throw a ball, listen to music and forget he was missing his book. When he returned, they’d eat dinner, he’d do his homework at the kitchen table, then he’d open the violin case. He had no stand for his music, but as he slipped into the routine of practice, muscle memory took over. His hands remembered where to go, what shapes to make, and the notes flowed easily. When he did not remember, he could prop up the sheets on a bookshelf, or pin them to his corkboard and read the staves like poetry. 

Damian spoke five languages. Farsi from his mother, English from the League, French and Mandarin from the tutors, Spanish from Father. Every word he said, he knew how to say at least four other ways. There were words in each of them that were untranslatable: querencia, ya'aburnee, contresens, but he knew how to get across feeling, meaning, even without that one word that encompassed it. He took Spanish at school because it was offered, not because he did not know it. It was an easy class. He sometimes spoke in French to Grayson, listened in on commuters on the subway who rattled off long strings of Mandarin, swore in Farsi when he thought he could get away with it. There were so many words and languages in his brain it was a wonder he did not lose something. And music made it all go quiet, made all the words and phrases and conjugations go silent. There was just him and the music and the paper.

If it were possible without sounding mad, Damian would say music was his second language. Certainly, he had started learning it before he had learned English. Sometimes he thought he knew the notes to the song of his heart better than he knew the words to describe it.

It was Dick’s idea that he join the orchestra in high school. Damian almost refused: he had always played solo, never even with an accompanist, and teamwork had never been his strong suit. But Dick insisted, and so he signed up. There was an audition, which he passed, and then it was time to meet the other lucky souls who spent their evenings in the pit. He was the youngest, but he’d expected that. He would not be the principal violin for many years yet, such was the hierarchy of a high school orchestra. This he had accepted. But he was welcomed as if he was an old friend, and somehow it felt like coming home.

They had a concert at Christmas, another in the spring, and one final show in the summer, just before vacation began. They practiced simple pieces to learn each other’s quirks before they began to practice concert pieces in earnest, little games and exercises, and Damian had never thought to _play_ before, though it was - of course - the verb of choice for instrumentalists. Music was not a game, it was a skill to be honed, until that changed, until he learnt to free himself from endless repetition unto perfection. Sometimes, he thought, perfection did not matter.

And then the concert pieces came and everyone became serious. Damian felt, for the first time, off-beat. He made silly mistakes sometimes, missed a note or slipped or miscounted, and messed up the whole piece for their section. He hated it. The others were kind enough about it, and they made plenty of their own mistakes, but failure was not an option. He had grown up with a violin in hand almost as often as a blade (though always in secret, always hidden) and there was no excuse for such glaring errors. He grimaced, and tensed and grumbled, and the others took it to just be his nature. 

When he came home from rehearsal, he practiced until his fingertips split and bled, and then he practiced more. He learned long ago how to remove blood from a violin’s strings.

Eventually, he stopped making mistakes, played as flawlessly as any of the other violinists, and they were as ready for the concert as they would ever be. The hall was decked out in holly and tinsel and fairy lights, and they tuned their instruments as the stage lights dimmed. Dick was in the audience, Pennyworth too, and a hundred strangers who would never remember his name. It was a comfort, for once, to not be centre stage. They would play as one, and he would be just a cog in the machine, adding to a song already floating in the air.

There was a standing ovation, applause, cheers. Damian loved it.

  
He had never imagined playing the violin for anyone but himself, before. In Gotham, he had retreated to his room, practiced in solitude for a performance that would never come, played endlessly harder and faster and more technically challenging pieces for no purpose but his own pride. He had loved it, in his own way, but it was a melancholy thing, to play alone. He could not imagine it now. What had he worked towards, without the drive of performance? Without the knowledge of people beside him counting on him to succeed? Perhaps the orchestra felt like coming home because he had never been meant to play alone. Practicing at home sounded strange without his fellows at his sides to make the melody soar. Page turning was harder without a stand mate there to remind him at the end of a line. How could he go back to the lonely, solitary player he was before, stagnating under his own self-isolation? He had learned violin before he had learned English. He learned to _play_ when he learned to be free.

**Author's Note:**

> I spent way too long on wikipedia with a glossary trying to remember what stuff meant and found the perfect title there. Liberissimamente means 'as free as can be' and I love that idea too much to pass up on.  
> It is now 2am. I quite literally wrote this instead of sleeping. Hope you liked it.


End file.
